In the news…

1.  Mark Berndt, a teacher, charged with 23 counts of lewd conduct in his classroom successfully thwarted attempts by the Los Angeles Unified School District to fire him. In the process, the teacher, who is accused of spoon-feeding his semen to blindfolded children, managed to retain lifetime health-benefits provided by the nation’s second-largest school system after he hired the attorneys of the liberal United Teachers Los Angeles union. He will also automatically receive nearly $4,000 a month in pension from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System.

2.  There’s bribery, corruption, and a cover-up at the Obama Justice Department and no, we aren’t talking about Fast and Furious.  At least two DOJ prosecutors accepted cash bribes from allegedly corrupt finance executives who were indicted under court seal within the past 13 months, but never arrested or prosecuted.  Additionally, the sitting governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, his attorney general and an unspecified number of Virgin Islands legislators also accepted bribes.  A DOJ official adds that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is aware prosecutors and elected officials were bribed and otherwise compromised, but has not held anyone accountable.

According to an attorney with knowledge of the investigation the bribed officials remain on the taxpayers’ payroll at the Justice Department without any accountability. The DOJ offical said Holder does not want to admit public officials accepted bribes while under his leadership.

In the news…

1.  Gallup, one of liberals most trusted polls,  released their annual state-by-state presidential approval numbers yesterday, and the results should have Obama very worried. If President Obama carries only those states where he had a net positive approval rating in 2011, for example, Koolaid drinking Michigan where he is up 48 percent to 44 percent), Obama would lose the 2012 election to the Republican nominee 323 electoral votes to 215.

2.  First Lady Michelle Obama cited “remarkable progress” on the economy during a speech for a small crowd of high-profile Hollywood names in Los Angeles.  This comes on the heels of a CBO released report citing real unemployment at 10%.   There is real job growth, however.  In New York City, government officials are hiring for their welfare agency as record numbers apply for government help.  Meanwhile, American Airlines, one of many US companies to file for bankruptcy recently, plans to lay off 13,000 employees.

3. Indiana became the Rust Belt’s first right-to-work state Wednesday in a move that will further curtail union rights.  Gov. Mitch Daniels’ signature Wednesday on the bill that made Indiana the nation’s 23rd right-to-work state was the end of a contentious two-year political battle that included partisan bickering, lawmaker walkouts, legislative stall tactics and union protests. In the end, Indiana marked the first win for national right-to-work supporters.

4.  MSNBCs’ Martin Bashir, who seems to find racism in every Republican comment, invited Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) to weigh in on the comments made by Black Republican Congressman West in which West suggested that liberals take their ideology somewhere out of this country.  Moran suggested that West was not representative of the African-American community.  West served in the US Army as a Colonel and is a war veteran.

Courtesy:  John Paulus

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In the news today…

1.  Former Goldman Sachs CEO, disgraced banker, former Democrat governor an senator of New Jersey Jon Corzine has helped to raise more than $500,000 for the 2012 Obama re-election effort.  Corzine, who Obama once hailed as an “honorable man” and one of his “best partners” in the White House, has been in the news recently for bankrupting MF Global and unable to account for $1.2 billion in investor and retirement money.

2. According to the non-partisan CBO the unemployment rate is actually 10%. would be even higher than it is now had participation in the labor force not declined as much as it has over the past few years. In fact, the rate of participation in the labor force is what is was in 2007. The CBO reports that as 66% decline- an unusually large decline over so short a time. About a third of that decline reflects factors other than the downturn, such as the aging of the baby-boom generation. But even with those factors removed, the estimated decline in that rate during the past four years is larger than has been typical of past downturns, even after accounting for the greater severity of this downturn. Had that portion of the decline in the labor force participation rate since 2007 that is attributable to neither the aging of the baby boomers nor the downturn in the business cycle (on the basis of the experience in previous downturns) not occurred, the unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of 2011 would have been about 1¼ percentage points higher than the actual rate of 8.7 percent.

3. Obama took questions from Google + members. There was this exchange…

“I don’t know what your husband’s speciality [is], but I can tell you that there is a huge demand around the country for engineers,” Obama told the woman.

“I understand that,” she responded. “But how am — given the list that you’re getting, I mean we’re not getting that. You said in the State of the Union address for business leaders to ask what can they do to bring jobs back to America.”

During the back and forth between Obama and the wife of an unemployed engineer, Obama asked for his resume.

“Can I ask you what kind of engineer your husband is?” Obama said to the wife of the unemployed engineer.

“He’s a semiconductor engineer,” she responded.

“It is interesting to me — and I meant what I said if your send me your husband’s resume, I’d be interested in finding out exactly what’s happening right there because the word that we’re getting is that somebody in that type of high-tech field, that kind of engineer, should be able to find something right away,” Obama said.

4.  President Obama mistakenly referred to the nation of Georgia as “Russia” after a bilateral meeting with the Georgian president — an unfortunate slip-up, given that the president was celebrating 20 years of Georgian independence from Soviet rule.

“[O]ne of the first things that I did was express my appreciation for the institution-building that’s been taking place in Russia — in Georgia,” Obama told reporters following a meeting with Georgia’s President Saakashvili.

Courtesy:  John Paulus

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In the news today…

1.  After several companies that the Obama administration invested wasted billions in taxpayer money have gone bankrupt, the U.S. Treasury Department boosted its estimate of government losses in the $85 billion auto bailout by $170 million.  In the government’s latest report to Congress this month, the Treasury upped its estimate to $23.77 billion, up from $23.6 billion.  Last fall, the government dramatically boosted its forecast of losses on the rescues of General Motors Co., Chrysler Group LLC and their finance units from $14 billion to $23.6 billion.  In the past, the Obama administration has claimed that the automakers paid back the money they were lent.

2.  Six doctors and Scientist claim that Obama’s  Food and Drug Administration secretly monitored the personal e-mail of a group of its own scientists and doctors after they warned Congress that the agency was approving medical devices that they believed posed unacceptable risks to patients, government documents show.

3.  According to the Washington Post it found that 63% of television weathermen think that global warming is a product of natural causes, while 31% believe it is from human activity.  Concerned that too many “deniers” are in the meteorology business, global warming activists this month launched a campaign to recruit local weathermen to hop aboard the alarmism bandwagon and expose those who are not fully convinced that the world is facing man-made doom.  So far, the campaign has identified 55 “deniers” in the meteorologist community and are looking for more.  This is nothing short of modern-day McCarthyism.

4.  We didn’t need the Washington Post to tell us this.  For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever.

5.  Two bioethicists — one from Duke University, the other from the National Institute of Health — bring up the question “What makes killing wrong?” in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. Using their definition of killing, the authors conclude if the person is “universally and irreversibly disabled” and has “no abilities to lose” then killing them to take organs for donation in order to save the lives of others should not be considered morally wrong.  This falls into line with other liberal thinking- if you’re retired and not contributing any longer to society there’s no reason to spend health-care money on life-saving operations or medication.

Courtesy:  John Paulus

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Do you remember this line in the President’s State of the Union speech last week;

So if you are a big bank or financial institution, you’re no longer allowed to make risky bets with your customers’ deposits. You’re required to write out a “living will” that details exactly how you’ll pay the bills if you fail — because the rest of us are not bailing you out ever again.

It was one of those lines that easily drew applause.  If you’re like me, and one of those independent thinkers, you cringed at the Obama hypocrisy.

Did the Obama administration care about risky bets when it gave Solyndra a half a billion dollars of taxpayer money after it was repeatedly warned that the company would go bankrupt?  Moreover, why did the Obama administration restructure the loan so that Democrat investors got paid back before the taxpayer- is that Obama’s version of a “living will” for his friends at the expense of the American taxpayer?

Solydra is not the only company which received part of the $800 billion stimulus that later went bankrupt.  Evergreen Solar filed bankruptcy in August of 2011.  SpectraWatt also filed bankruptcy is August of 2011.  Mountain Plaza, Inc filed for bankruptcy in June 2010.  Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Co. also failed.

There are many other examples of companies that the Obama administration ‘invested” our taxpayer money in that quickly went bankrupt.  According to Obama, we need to take these risk… but where are the demands to these companies on how they’ll “pay the bills” if they fail.  Where are their “living wills” to the taxpayer?

To drive home the point, earlier this week, Stimulus beneficiary Evergreen Energy bit the dust. Then, Ener1, a manufacturer of batteries for electric vehicles and recipient of Stimulus largesse, filed for bankruptcy. And Friday, the Las Vegas Sun reports that Amonix, Inc., a manufacturer of solar panels that received $5.9 million from the Porkulus, will cut two-thirds of its workforce, about 200 employees, only seven months after opening a factory in Nevada.

If the President is serious about no longer allowing risky investments, he can begin by ceasing sinking anymore taxpayer money into Fannie  Mae and Freddie Mac at a cost of $317 billion and still counting.

Time for the President to stop playing politics and start acting in the best interest of this country.

Courtesy:  John Paulus

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In the news…

1.  The unpopular Democrat Governor of North Carolina, who once said that elections should be suspended in order to give Democrats more time to pass legislation, has be forced by the Obama Administration not to run for a second term.

The surprise announcement that Governor Bev Perdue will not run for re-election comes at a time when polls show that her former opponent, Republican Pat McCrory, would easily beat her if the election were held today.  This would cause a big problem for the Obama strategy for re-election.  In 2008, Obama barely won North Carolina and will need a number of states he carried in the last election if he has any hope of winning.  Having an extremely unpopular Democrats governor in the swing state of North Carolina makes that goal much more difficult.  As a result, Bev Perdue was asked not to run again for the good of the Democrat Party.

2.  From the South to the West and to a extremely popular Republican governor.  A day after he called for an end to perpetual political confrontation, President Barack Obama and his deputies publicly snubbed Governor Jan Brewer when she welcomed him at the Phoenix airport.  According to the Governor, Obama exited the plane, refused to hear about the “Arizona turn around”,  turned cold, and  immediately scolded her over comments she made in her book.  Brewer’s book is titled “Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America’s Border.”

In the book, she described Obama as patronizing during their 2010 meeting when she asked for his help in curbing illegal immigration. His reaction, she wrote, “was though President Obama thought he could lecture me, and I would learn at his knee.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard similar stories about Obama and his administration having little respect for the opinions of women.  “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President,” by journalist Ron Suskind, Suskind writes that the Obama White House grew so intense during the first two years of the president’s tenure that he was forced to take steps to reassure senior women on his staff that he valued their presence and their input. Those tensions prompted Obama to elevate more women into senior White House positions, recognize them more during staff meetings and increase the female presence in the upper ranks of the reelection campaign.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama recycled much of the same rhetoric he has repeated for over three years.  He also introduced America to  Debra Bosanek, the 55 year old secretary to Warren Buffet, claiming that she paid more in taxes than the billionaire.

First, the President was being misleading.  In fact, in real dollars Warren Buffet paid much more in taxed than his secretary.  Most of Buffet’s earnings come in the form of investments and not ordinary income, which is taxed differently.  Bosanek salary is taxed as ordinary income and any investments she might have would be taxed as investment income which, when held more than 12 months, is taxed at a lower rate.

The president’s set up is this- Debra Bosanek is one of millions of middle income workers who pays more in taxes than the greedy rich and that the system must be repaired out of fairness and require those in the top 1% to pay more.  The top 1% is defined as anyone making more than $385,000 a year.  Data provided by the Obama IRS shows that those individual paid, on average, an net effective tax rate of 23.27%.  By the way, the bottom 50% paid a net effective tax rate of just 2.59%.

Based on the tax rate percentage Bosanek alleges she pays, Forbes has determined that she and her husband earn between $200,000 and $500,000 a year.  If this is the case, this would place her in the top 1%-5% of income earners in the United States.  The President should be celebrating that she’s paying her fair share and not using her as an example of inequality.

Since the President used her as an example, Bosanek should release her tax records so the American public can judge for themselves whether Bosanek is being unfairly tax- if there is truly inequality… or was this simple any gimmick by the President and a select group of his liberal elitist.

Bosanek, the new face of the middle class recently purchased a vacation home complete with built-in pool and putting green.  Life as a secretary must really be rough.

If the President and liberals want to be misleading about this, one has to question what else have they been lying about.

Courtesy:  John Paulus

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In the news today…

1.  Republican Presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, paid 42% of his income in taxes and charity.  Romney 2011 taxes has him earning $20.9 million on investments and paying 15.4% in taxes or $3.2 million.  Is Romney paying his “fair share”?  To put this in perspective that $3.2 million pays for:— The monthly food stamp allowance for about 23,909 people.

— The monthly food stamp allowance for about 23,909 people.

— The cost of educating 302 elementary and high school students.

— The base salary (before bonuses and allowances) of 178 privates in the U.S. Army.

— The federal contribution to the benefits of 636 Medicaid enrollees.

By contrast, John Kerry, the 2006 Democrat Presidential nominee, paid just 13% on his income when he released his tax returns in 2006.  In 2004, Democrats and the media refused to make Kerry’s net worth, said to be over $200 million, an issue in the campaign and justified the liberal Senator’s from Massachusetts’ tax rate.

2.  Much has been made of the Bush Tax Cuts and how the extension hasn’t really helped America get out of the recession- and there may be a reason why.  Under Obama Gas has gone up over 83% making commuting nearly twice as expensive.  Groceries have become equally as expensive.  Ground beef up 24%.  Bacon 22%.  Bread 5%. Ice cream 19%. Corn 32%. Rice 21%.  No word on whether Obama will call a windfall profit tax on farmers or launch an investigation on price gouging.  Conclusion:  If not for an extension of the Bush Tax more Americans might be on foodstamps.  Obama deserves credit for having the foresight to extend those cuts knowing that his policies have contributed to the rapid rise in food and energy prices.

Courtesy:  John Paulus

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So much in the way of news today…

1.  The Justice Department on Monday charged a John Kiriakou, a Democrat staffer and former CIA officer with repeatedly leaking classified information, including the identities of agency operatives involved in the capture and interrogation of alleged terrorists.  Kiriakou was charged with disclosing classified information to reporters and lying to the agency about the origin of other sensitive material he published in a book.

2. Perhaps it those Hollywood fundraisers or days on the golf course, but the Obama White House told Congress on Monday that its budget will be late this year, meaning President Obama once again will miss the deadline set in law.  Congressional officials said the president now will send up his budget on Feb. 13, which is a week later than the usual date. The law requires the budget be sent by the first Monday in February.  Obama has not made the budget deadline since he’s taken office.

3.  Kesler Dufrene, an illegal immigrant,  became a twice-convicted felon in 2006, a Bradenton judge shipped him to prison for five years. And because of his convictions, an immigration judge ordered Dufrene deported to his native Haiti.  That never happened. The Obama administration ordered a temporary halt of deportations to the island nation.  As a result, when Dufrene’s state prison term was up, Miami immigration authorities in October 2010 released him from custody. Two months later, he slaughtered three people, including a 15-year-old girl in a murder case that remains as baffling today as it did the afternoon the bodies were discovered.

In the news…

1.  Newt Gingrich may have just sealed up the 2012 election today with Democrat voters if he can win the Republican nomination.  Democrats, who for years have called Republicans “sexual uptight”, may have to amend that thought. It is rumored that ABC will report that the former House Speaker wanted to be a swinger and asked his former wife for an open relationship according to the Speaker’s ex-wife.

2.  VP Joe Biden continues to put the Dan Quayle “potato(e)” flub to shame.  Speaking to a San Francisco, the Vice President told the fund raising crows, “the Giants are on their way to the Super Bowl.”  San Francisco is home of the 49ers.

3.  Democrats are disputing Republican claims that the 1,700 mile Keystone Pipeline project rejected by Obama will cost the economy 22,000 jobs.  Interestingly, Democrats projected that the 1.7 mile San Francisco subway extension would created 43,000 jobs.  Only in liberal America would it take 43,000 union workers to complete 1.7 miles of subway.

4.  Gas prices to continue to soar and have doubled since the 2008 election wiping out any savings Americans saw with the Obama extension of the Bush tax cuts. Obama authorize the release of oil from the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve despite warnings from Republicans who rightly claimed that the failed decision would not bring down prices at the pump.

5. David Rubenstein, the co-founder of one of America’s largest private equity firm, has donated $7.5 million to restore the Washington Monument after an earthquake damaged the national icon.   Meanwhile, wealthy Democrats have donated nearly $126 million to 2012 Obama and the Democrat election while receiving an estimated $10.7 billion in stimulus money.

Courtesy:  John Paulus

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